THE HEMINGWAY INDUSTRY continues with no sense of slackening. Linda Wagner-Martin’s Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009) is the fourth in the series of decade-by-decade collections, and the Hemingway Review continues to flourish. While the number of journals still being published has diminished, others continue, and collections of essays on Hemingway continue to be published, for instance following the biennial international conferences of the Hemingway Society, as do books on or about Hemingway by individual authors under all sorts of rubrics. Cambridge University Press is beginning in 2011 a multi-volume edition of Hemingway’s letters.

Initially, criticism of The Sun Also Rises condemned the behavior of the characters while praising Hemingway’s terse, unadorned style. Many critics admired his realism and his craft in depicting expatriate life in Paris, even while they deplored the lifestyle; many saw the novel as a reaction to having participated in the First World War and a resulting expression of cynicism and world-weary despair. In the Depression-ridden 1930s Hemingway was usually condemned for his lack of political commitment and apparent economic unawareness — especially since two of his books during that decade celebrated bullfighting and an African safari — and that criticism included The Sun Also Rises as well. As the New Criticism began to be applied to works of fiction, Delmore Schwartz, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, and other critics saw greater depths to Hemingway’s fiction than earlier critics had. They saw the use of Eliot’s The Waste Land, with Jake as Fisher King and modern Europe as a Waste Land, Jake as questing seeker. They saw the similarity between Eliot’s objective correlative and Hemingway’s quest for, as he put it in Death in the Afternoon, “the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion” (2), and they began to see that Jake was trying to fashion a code of conduct by which to live, which led them to theorize and speculate about the Hemingway code hero and about existentialism in his works.

The critical pace picked up in the ‘50s, as soldiers on the GI Bill got graduate degrees and intently studied Hemingway, an author whose works they had carried in army-issued paperbacks, at the same time as American universities expanded offerings in American contemporary literature.